Jonathan Rawle's Websitehttp://jonathan.rawle.org
Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:45:25 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Tuition fees: Blunkett should do more homeworkhttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2019/01/20/tuition-fees-blunkett-should-do-more-homework/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2019/01/20/tuition-fees-blunkett-should-do-more-homework/#respondSun, 20 Jan 2019 21:45:25 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=518Former Secretary of State for Education David Blunkett wrote a piece for the Guardian last week, arguing that instead of cutting university tuition fees, the government should reduce the interest rate that applies to the loans that cover repayment of the fees.

I am not going to argue one way or another when it comes to fees. It’s a complex issue. However, Lord Blunkett’s mathematics don’t quite add up, and the article contains at least one glaring error. I have previously written an explanation of the student funding system, which has changed little since it was proposed in 2010.

Lord Blunkett makes the point that a cut in fees would damage some university departments, a claim I have no issue with, and maybe that alone is a reason not to cut fees. However, the remainder of his argument is flawed. He claims that a cut in fees would only benefit (my emphasis) those students who currently pay off their full loan before the 30-year time limit, when any remaining loan is written off. On the other hand, he says a reduction in the interest rate that is charged from the current 6.3% would increase the likelihood of the total amount being repaid.

While 6.3% sounds high in the current period of exceptionally low interest rates, can it really be claimed that cutting this rate has a significantly bigger effect on repayments than reducing the amount borrowed by nearly a third? This is actually not straightforward to calculate as it is necessary to make assumptions about future inflation rates and rises in earnings. However, cutting the original loan amount certainly means that some people who currently would not repay the loan would do so, as the initial amount is smaller, and the amount on which interest is accrued is smaller. Therefore, cutting fees would benefit some people who do not currently pay off their loans in exactly the way that cutting interest rates would.

Lord Blunkett focuses on low earners in his article, and this is where he really should have done his homework. The 6.3% rate already only applies to graduates who earn more than £45,000 – not a small amount. Lower interest rates apply to lower earners, but this is conveniently omitted from the article.

The other glaring error is that the article claims graduates repay their loans by paying 9% of their income each year. This is incorrect, although whether it was really what David Blunkett wrote, rather than a Guardian subediting error, is anyone’s guess. The repayment is 9% of income over £25,000. So someone earning £30,000 pays £450 per year, or 1.5% of their income. And someone earning £25,000 pays nothing. This is the same whatever interest rate applies to the loan. The idea was never that students all paid off their loans, but this is the crucial point that so many people fail to understand.

The tuition fee system is far from perfect, and I wouldn’t like to be the one tasked with sorting it out. However, it doesn’t help when commentators and people in the public eye continue to spread misinformation about it. I grade the former education secretary’s article C- at best.

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2019/01/20/tuition-fees-blunkett-should-do-more-homework/feed/0E-cigarettes should not be allowed on buseshttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/08/17/e-cigarettes-should-not-be-allowed-on-buses/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/08/17/e-cigarettes-should-not-be-allowed-on-buses/#commentsFri, 17 Aug 2018 16:50:07 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=516I have sometimes found the debate on e-cigarettes a little puzzling. Some experts argue that they are probably not completely safe, and therefore that they should not be allowed, or at least that they should only be allowed on prescription, or from chemists. If e-cigarettes were a completely new, stand-alone activity that had been invented, there might be such an argument. However, the debate is completely changed and distorted out of all proportion by the fact that e-cigarettes are, in the vast majority of cases, used as an alternative to a highly dangerous and addictive product: the conventional tobacco cigarette. The latter is a product that would certainly not be legal if it were invented today, but for unfortunate historical and societal reasons, we are stuck with it for the time being as governments around the world put in a huge amount of effort to persuade people not to use it. Anything that can be used as an alternative that helps people to give up smoking must be welcomed. Even if it is not entirely safe, vaping is clearly much, much less harmful than smoking. If must therefore not be seen as a stand-alone product, but rather in the context of tobacco smoking, and should be at least as easy to obtain and use. Even if a small number of people start to use e-cigarettes who did not previously smoke, I would say that’s a small price worth paying for the health benefits enjoyed by others who give up smoking, and chances are, many of that small minority of non-smokers taking it up might instead have been tempted to start smoking if e-cigarettes were not available.

I therefore cautiously welcome the general thrust of a report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which argues that more use should be made of e-cigarettes as a tool to reduce the number of people smoking. However, the BBC News homepage had the slightly sensationalised headline, “Vaping on buses ‘should be considered'”. The actual article has a more sensible title and makes it clear that the MPs call for “a debate on vaping in public spaces, such as on public transport and in offices”, but I find this suggestion a cause for concern. Some news outlets have suggested a change in the law to allow vaping in indoors public spaces, but in fact it is not covered by the smoking ban as it does not constitute smoking. Vaping is generally not allowed on public transport, in workplaces or entertainment venues because the owners of those buildings and vehicles choose to prohibit it, just as they did for smoking for many years before it was banned by law.

While I am quite clear that vaping should be a widely available alternative to smoking even though there is probably a small health risk associated with it, that does not extend to allowing people using e-cigarettes to expose other members of the public to their vapour. The effects of vaping, first- or second-hand, have not been studied in any depth. There is absolutely no reason why a member of the public who chooses to live a clean life and has no wish to smoke or vape should be subjected to either while going about his or her business in public. No-one likes the idea of the “nanny state” where government tells people what to do, but it is sometimes necessary when behaviour causes a burden on the state, such as smoking on the NHS. However, where the government does need to act in a civil society is to protect its citizens from the actions of others. By all means allow people to make choices that may harm their health, within reason; but the wishes of those who do not wish to do so needs to take priority where there is a conflict of interest.

I can see no reason for allowing e-cigarettes to be used in places where smoking is currently prohibited. As long as e-cigarettes are as widely available and convenient to use as conventional cigarettes, surely that’s good enough? While it’s nowhere near as unpleasant as cigarette smoke, vapour in public places still invades others’ personal space; being enveloped in a cloud of vapour can be a strange experience. Sometimes it can have a fruity or perfumed smell, but some people choose to use products that give a smell similar to tobacco smoke, which is quite unpleasant. As I pointed out earlier, smoking would never be allowed if it was discovered today, and nor would smoking in public, yet it took governments many decades to have the courage to ban the latter to a limited extent. The last thing they should consider now is to allow another form of antisocial activity to become entrenched in public, which would then have to be similarly addressed in 10 or 20 years’ time. It would be much more sensible to retain restrictions on where e-cigarettes can be used – which are currently largely voluntary and self-policed; already part of the norms of society – rather than to allow an activity to become normalised in public, and therefore difficult to reverse in the future.

If it is really considered necessary to make vaping more convenient in terms of where it is permitted in order to persuade more smokers to switch, I have a suggestion. It’s about time the current laws on smoking in public places were reviewed. It is still unacceptable to have to breathe in others’ smoke while walking down the street, entering a building or waiting at a bus stop. Instead of increasing the number of places people are allowed to vape, why not restrict where they can smoke? Vapour is less unpleasant and less likely to trigger someone’s asthma as they walk along the street, or get into office air conditioning units as smokers congregate outside. A purely indoor ban on vaping is sufficient to protect others. On the other hand, smoking could be much more heavily restricted to remove the last remaining pockets of unpleasantness that non-smokers – including ex-smokers keen not to re-start – have to face daily. Make the office smoking point vaping-only, and tell people to leave their cigarettes at home.

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/08/17/e-cigarettes-should-not-be-allowed-on-buses/feed/1New BBC Weather page with MeteoGroup forecasthttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/02/01/new-bbc-weather-page-with-meteogroup-forecast/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/02/01/new-bbc-weather-page-with-meteogroup-forecast/#commentsThu, 01 Feb 2018 23:44:50 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=509In 2015, it was announced that the Met Office had lost the contract to provide the BBC’s weather for the first time since forecasts started in 1922, with the contract instead going to MeteoGroup. Towards the end of last year, it was announced that MeteoGroup were behind schedule in their work towards providing the BBC’s forecasts, so the contract with the Met Office had to be extended until March.

This week, I discovered that the BBC Weather website looked different in one of my browsers. They must be selecting people at random to try the new MeteoGroup-powered website. Not only is the data provider changing, but it seems the BBC have taken the opportunity to tinker with the layout of their weather pages.

The new BBC Weather website, with forecasts from MeteoGroup

The new page has a wider layout with an updated look and feel. As is now increasingly common in an era when people are switching to tablets, the page is shorter, to avoid the need to scroll on a landscape screen. One thing that is immediately noticeable is the lack of colours indicating the temperatures throughout the day. The BBC tried to remove these in a previous update in 2011, and ended up having to add them back after “user feedback”. In fact, the colours are present in the new layout for the daily average temperatures, but as far less prominent stripes of colour below the daily forecast (or above the currently selected one). The colours are, however, not used at all for the hourly temperatures, a reversal of the previous situation. Another change is that there is no longer an option to switch between “graph” and “table” views, with the graph view forced on everyone. I happen to prefer the view with the temperatures lining up, but this choice has been taken away. Details such as the humidity and pressure were previously only visible on the five-day forecast page in table view, so these are currently missing.

Thankfully, the BBC has retained its classic weather symbols on the new page. The wind speed indicators have switched to a circular outline rather than filled circles. There is also a new symbol and a percentage, showing the probability of rain during that hour.

The old BBC Weather page with data from the Met Office, showing the “Table” view

The new layout looks OK, but they really need to bring back the colours for all the temperature values, and also the option of table mode with all the old data. But how about the quality of the new forecasts from MeteoGroup? Clearly, it’s too early to say how accurate the forecasts will be from the new provider. Having said that, on the day I took the screenshots above, MeteoGroup said the next hour’s weather would feature hail showers. The Met Office’s version predicted sunny spells. Out of the window: nice and sunny. While I realise it’s not exactly a thorough comparison, it’s possibly not the best of first impressions of the MeteoGroup forecast.

Of course, anyone who objects to the Met Office being replaced like this can always go directly to the Met Office website. This should contain exactly the same information as the old BBC forecasts. Unfortunately, it does lack the bold BBC weather symbols, instead having its own cartoon-like versions, and the differing shades of orange are no match for the familiar BBC temperature colours. It does, however, have more details about weather warnings, and includes some additional information, for example giving both the wind speed and maximum gust speed separately (the BBC usually give the former, but switch to showing gusts once they are over 40mph, which is why the wind speeds reported always jump from the 20s to 40s and never show a value in the 30s!)

The same weather forecast on the Met Office site

The Met Office site also carries advertising, despite being a .gov.uk branded site. The BBC, of course, never features advertising, so we have the slightly bizarre situation of being able to view a forecast from the private MeteoGroup free of advertising, or a forecast from the UK Meteorological Office complete with adverts.

I feel some sort of Greasemonkey script or similar is in order to restore the perfect weather page. How about the new BBC page but with colours; or the Met Office page with the BBC’s symbols and colours? The numbers used for the image filenames on the Met Office site are identical to those on the old BBC site, ranging from 0 for a clear sky at night, to 31 for a rather alarming-looking whirlwind symbol, which thankfully we do not usually see in UK forecasts. Hopefully, though, no hacking will be required, and “user feedback” will ensure the best aspects of the old layout will be retained in a way that works with the new data from MeteoGroup. But anyone who tires of spurious warnings of hail showers will know where to look for a second opinion.

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/02/01/new-bbc-weather-page-with-meteogroup-forecast/feed/2Airbnb: Turning homes into hotelshttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/01/28/airbnb-turning-homes-into-hotels/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/01/28/airbnb-turning-homes-into-hotels/#respondSun, 28 Jan 2018 19:34:39 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=507The original premise of Airbnb seemed like a good one. If someone had a spare room, they could let it out as a bed and breakfast room to bring in an extra bit of cash. The person staying would be a guest in their host’s home, meet them, probably chat with them in the evening, and share breakfast in the morning. However, Airbnb has turned into something quite different. It is now used by professional landlords to let out entire properties on a day-by-day basis. Unsurprisingly, a landlord can make much more money from such short-term lets than they can from a long-term tenant paying monthly.

Turning a home into a de facto hotel is quite unfair on the neighbours, who have to put up with different people arriving each day or week, and with guests’ behaviour, which may not be of the same high standard as when they are at home. Councils are starting to take action, with London banning property owners from letting them out short-term for more than 90 days per year, and there are plans to introduce a similar restriction in other cities such as Edinburgh and Liverpool.

The craze for turning homes into hotel rooms has been around longer than Airbnb, however. In 2007, the Rotunda, an iconic, cylindrical office building in Birmingham, was extensively refurbished and converted into apartments. Due to its location and being a famous building, these flats sold for a hefty premium. A significant number, however, were bought by a company trading as Staying Cool, for use as “serviced apartments”. I thought at the time that this was simply a euphemism for turning them into hotel rooms. It seemed rather unfair on people who had bought their apartments to live in, for them to discover they were sharing the building with a hotel, despite no planning permission existing for such a use. Today, some of these rooms are available for £300 or more per night.

It seems a grey area exists where “serviced apartments”, including Airbnb-style lets, are concerned. English planning law defines various use classes. Class C1 is for hotels, and class C3 for “dwellinghouses”. Most homes will only have planning permission for C3, and indeed the Rotunda was granted change of use to class C3. Why, therefore, are people allowed effectively to run hotels from their properties? The idea of planning law is that local councils can decide whether a certain site is appropriate for use as a hotel, particularly regarding nuisance caused to neighbours. It’s unlikely a few flats in a building would be given such permission unless certain facilities were provided, maybe even a separate entrance and lifts.

The solution to the problem of Airbnb could be to tighten up the planning rules. If someone wants to let out a single room, as was the original idea of Airbnb, of course that should be allowed, as long as it only involves letting out part of the property, and the host actually lives there too. If, however, it’s a case of letting out whole apartments as hotel suites, change of use to C1 should be required, and then it would be up to the authorities to decide whether such use is appropriate. Landlords should not be able to profit hugely from turning their properties into hotels at the expense of people who are looking for somewhere to live, and people who have the enjoyment of their homes ruined by holidaymakers or party-goers.

At the end of this month, some people will have the opportunity to see a moon that is both a red moon and a blue moon. Of course, it will be a figurative blue moon but a literal red moon, the latter caused by a total lunar eclipse.

Neither lunar eclipses nor blue moons are actually that rare. This month’s will be the eighth total lunar eclipse since 2010 (although unfortunately not visible from most of Europe this time) and indeed there will be another one in July. As for “once a blue moon”, that is usually taken to mean not for a very long time. However, these days, a blue moon is usually defined as the second full moon in a month, and that isn’t actually so rare either. In fact, there will be another blue moon in March!

There is some uncertainty as to the exact definition of a blue moon. Some sources say it occurs where there are four full moons in a quarter of a year (in which case, “blue moon” refers to the third one). Using this definition, there have only been three blue moons since 2010, and the next isn’t due until 2019.

This month’s event also coincides with a so-called “super moon” where the moon is closer to the Earth, so appears bigger. A super blood-red blue moon.

Lunar eclipses and blue moons both necessarily occur when there is a full moon. Both occurring together is far more unusual, though. The last time there was a total lunar eclipse coinciding with a blue moon was on 31 March 1866! Perhaps the expression should be “Once in a red and blue moon”. However, for those of us unable to see this rare phenomenon this January, there’s no need to wait 150 years. There is another one due in December 2028!

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2018/01/01/once-in-a-red-and-blue-moon/feed/0Orchestrating songs, or singing orchestral tracks?http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/05/11/orchestrating-songs-or-singing-orchestral-tracks/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/05/11/orchestrating-songs-or-singing-orchestral-tracks/#respondThu, 11 May 2017 21:17:25 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=488Classic FM is shortly going to release a new album, Pop Goes Classical. They have already played tracks from it on the station. It features the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra playing versions of famous pop songs.

The track that they keep playing on the station is a version of the 1991 song (Everything I Do) I Do It for You. (Now, why is it always written with the first three words in brackets?) This was originally sung by Bryan Adams, and famously accompanied the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, spending a record 16 weeks at the top of the UK singles chart.

Credit for writing the song is usually given to Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen, and Robert Lange. Michael Kamen wrote the score for the movie, but I seem to remember reading that he didn’t think there should be a song to go with the film. Adams and Lange therefore took Kamen’s music and turned it into the song. Classic FM have been crediting the track as being “by” Bryan Adams. I thought this was rather inaccurate as neither his lyrics nor his singing is included. The tune was clearly by Michael Kamen. I therefore dropped a quick note to presenter Bill Turnbull, who had played the track. Earlier this week, I heard him play it for a third time, and to my surprise, this time he credited it to Michael Kamen. I’d like to think that’s because I, and perhaps others, pointed out the omission.

The fact remains that there was already an orchestral version of the song, and it pre-dates the song itself. Anyone who wants to hear Michael Kamen’s own version of it should listen to the track Maid Marian from the soundtrack album. It does seem slightly bizarre to orchestrate a song that started life as an orchestral piece, particularly when, it has to be said, the original was far superior.

This is not the first time Classic FM have released such an album. In 2008, they released Songs Without Words, a very similar CD played by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. As I write, this is still available from Amazon for the princely sum of £16.04, or for 15p second-hand. This CD features that other famous movie song, My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic. As with Everything I Do, James Horner’s orchestral score for Titanic already includes many versions of the same tune, including one for Irish bagpipes. The song is credited to Horner and lyricist Will Jennings (and it was sung by another Canadian singer, Celine Dion). But the version on Songs Without Words is turned into a slightly jaunty waltz. That’s clearly from the special edition of the film where the ship doesn’t sink.

Orchestral versions of pop songs are a nice idea, but is it just a coincidence that the most popular are pieces that started out as orchestral works in the first place? Perhaps we should just listen to the originals, rather than arrangements of pop songs derived from them – the latter simply not being as good!

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/05/11/orchestrating-songs-or-singing-orchestral-tracks/feed/0Garden Bridge has fallen downhttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/04/29/garden-bridge-has-fallen-down/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/04/29/garden-bridge-has-fallen-down/#commentsSat, 29 Apr 2017 15:32:55 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=483At last a piece of good news. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has finally withdrawn support for the proposed Garden Bridge across the River Thames, effectively killing the project. After a report by a committee of MPs earlier this month said the bridge should be scrapped, any other decision on the part of the mayor would have been just the latest in a series of scandalous decisions wasting yet more public money on this vanity project.

I have been among those opposed to the bridge from early on. Anyone who knows the South Bank will know that it is already usually packed with people, given that it is home to many attractions such as the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre, the Hayward Gallery, the London Eye and the Aquarium, not to mention numerous restaurants. The last thing this area needs is another tourist attraction, and tourist attraction is exactly what this so-called bridge was. It wasn’t to be built in an area that needed a new bridge: there are two bridges nearby, and the northern end would land at Temple which is a quiet area where law firms are based, not so popular with visitors. The bridge would be privately owned, cycling would not be permitted, it would be closed at night, and could be closed in the daytime for private functions. Many people were also upset that it would block views across the river to St Paul’s Cathedral.

Trees with blue and white lights on the South Bank. Photo by Marco Marini on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence

My main objection was to the damage it would do to the South Bank. If you walk east from the Royal Festival Hall, you soon come to an area where the riverside walk widens out. This is a welcome breather from where it is rammed full of tourists closer to the London Eye, and offers an opportunity to enjoy strolling along the river for a short distance with slightly more space. This part of the path is lined on both sides by mature trees which are strung with blue and white lights, making it equally appealing at night. This is just the area where the southern end of the bridge would have “landed”. Indeed, the so-called Garden Bridge would have resulted in the felling of many mature trees, and in their place would have been a concrete building housing 350 square metres of commercial space.

The bridge would have spoilt one of the most pleasant stretches of the South Bank. I’m glad it will no longer go ahead. What needs to happen now is that the people who have allowed £40 million of public money to be spent on this project before any construction had even started need to be investigated, starting with former mayor Boris Johnson.

It’s not that a garden bridge is a bad idea in itself. This was simply the wrong place, and the way the design was chosen was verging on the corrupt. (Anyone who just knows Thomas Heatherwick for his work on the 2012 Olympic cauldron might do well to consider his contribution to the 2002 Commonwealth Games.) Why not construct a garden bridge somewhere that actually needs a bridge, and could do with the extra footfall a new attraction will bring?

Happily, it was the Garden Bridge that fell and not the South Bank’s trees. Hopefully a few egos will fall with it.

Links

Garden Bridge Trust – official site. Note how all the pro-bridge news articles are from The Times…

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/04/29/garden-bridge-has-fallen-down/feed/1Zhou Youguang (1906–2017)http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/01/14/zhou-youguang-1906-2017/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/01/14/zhou-youguang-1906-2017/#respondSat, 14 Jan 2017 23:24:52 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=473Zhou Youguang, who died today, the day after his 111th birthday, was known as the “Father of Hanyu Pinyin” due to his role in designing the Romanization system widely used for representing Mandarin Chinese. Today, Pinyin is the official Romanization system for Mandarin in China and many other countries, is used in millions of people’s passports, determines the spelling of names of well known Chinese people and places in foreign media and publications, and is an ISO standard. However, it was initially designed as a tool to help increase literacy levels in China.

Zhou Youguang started out not as a linguist, but as an economist. As a young man, he worked in New York as a banker. During his time in the United States, he apparently counted Albert Einstein among his acquaintances. However, after the Communist revolution in China in 1949, Zhou decided to return to his homeland. Quickly realising that the services of an economist might not be appreciated, he reinvented himself by turning to his hobby of linguistics, and was appointed head of a committee tasked with designing a phonetic system to represent Mandarin Chinese.

Chinese characters as written contain a wealth of information about ideas and words, but no indication of the pronunciation. This made teaching the reading and writing of Chinese difficult, with the result that the majority of people in China were illiterate. The Communist government wanted a new system to represent the sounds of the characters, with the ultimate goal of improving literacy rates. The committee was tasked with looking at the options for such a system, but the type of system was not specified. Any sort of alphabet or symbols could have been devised. Zhou, however, having lived and worked in America, was convinced that the Roman alphabet was the best solution, and was eventually successful in persuading the authorities to go along with it. The details of the Pinyin system then took three years to devise.

While Romanization systems such as Wade-Giles had been developed before, they tended to be foreign in origin and required marks such as apostrophes and hyphens in order to work. Pinyin makes particularly efficient use of the alphabet, and also gives words and names in Mandarin the dignity of not having their syl-la-bles divided up, or random CaPiTal letters inserted. While some people may complain that the use of letters such as q and x in Pinyin seems illogical, that misses the point that it is a system of Romanisation, not Anglicization. Spanish or French speakers, for example, use these letters in a quite different way from English speakers, and the same is true of Pinyin. Once someone is familiar with Pinyin, it is a consistent, phonetic system of spelling, so they are then able to pronounce any Mandarin word. This is real boon for anyone learning Mandarin as a foreign language. It has also changed the way that the language is taught in schools in China, where children learn the alphabet before they learn to write Chinese characters, although precisely how much of the improvement in literacy can be attributed to Pinyin is hard to gauge.

Despite being behind the Romanization system for Chinese, Zhou Youguang had no wish for it to replace Chinese characters. He has said he was glad to be on the committee for producing a phonetic system, and not the parallel committee tasked with simplifying the Chinese characters themselves (another aspect of the reforms under Mao Zedong). He also said it was “impossible” for Pinyin to replace Chinese characters, even if one wished to do such a thing.

For a while, Zhou Youguang’s involvement with Pinyin earned him a relatively comfortable life in Communist China. Although not a member of the Communist Party, his position entitled him to eat at government canteens at a time when there were food shortages. He would recall how he and his wife would eat their meals sitting next to Puyi, the man who had been the last Emperor of China. In the ’60s, though, like many academics, he was sent to the countryside for “re-education”. He attributed his survival during that difficult period to his positive thinking. (Puyi wasn’t so lucky: born a month after Zhou, his treatment during that period saw him die aged just 61.)

Zhou went on to work on the Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his later years, he lived in an apartment in Beijing with unpainted walls, to save him from the disruption of having them decorated. Although he didn’t use computers, he wrote daily using an electric typewriter, which naturally used his own Pinyin system to input characters. His son, Zhou Xiaoping, an atmospheric physicist, died in 2015.

It was only on becoming a centenarian that Zhou became a fierce critic of the Communist regime. He joked, “What are they going to do, come and take me away?” Books he wrote were banned, and internet posts praising him censored. He had wished to live long enough to see China admit the violent clampdown on protestors in Tian’anmen Square had been a mistake – a mistake he said ruined the reputation of Deng Xiaoping, who up until that point Zhou had considered an outstanding politician, with his policies of opening up China. Zhou said people in China no longer believed in the Communist system, and that most intellectuals believed in democracy.

Zhou Youguang was probably the world’s oldest democracy and human rights campaigner. While he may not have had his wish to see such significant change in China granted during his lifetime, surely one of the important principles behind democracy is that people are well informed, and literacy is the tool through which that is achieved. Zhou’s Pinyin system has given the Chinese people literacy, and given the rest of the world an easier way to learn Chinese, with which comes a better understanding of Chinese people and culture. Zhou’s legacy will include a contribution to democracy and peace in China.

Links

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2017/01/14/zhou-youguang-1906-2017/feed/0Classic FM HD streamhttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2016/11/06/classic-fm-hd-stream/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2016/11/06/classic-fm-hd-stream/#commentsSun, 06 Nov 2016 21:39:30 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=466For the latest post in my occasional series about digital radio, I was intrigued to receive an e-mail from Classic FM this week advertising “HD audio” in their mobile app. There are versions of the app for Apple and Android devices, and they allow users to listen to live broadcasts, as well as to a library of on-demand programmes from the last week. I have never used the app, so was unaware of what bitrate it offered to start off with. I decided to examine it to discover what this “HD sound” actually is.

The Classic FM app

When it first launches, with “HD off”, the app streams the low bitrate, 48kb/s AAC stream from the usual “musicradio” Icecast server. The details of those streams are unchanged since that article was written in 2012, except that the 48kb/s MP3 stream no longer exists. Most people wanting a low-bitrate stream are better off using the higher quality AAC anyway.

Switching to HD requires logging in with a Classic FM account. However, rather than using the old 128kb/s MP3 stream, the app fetches a new, 192kb/s AAC stream at the URL /ClassicFMHD. Unfortunately, this stream can not simply be used from within a PC’s media player or internet radio. It requires some sort of authentication so that only the official mobile app can make use of it. This follows the trend set by the BBC, where – officially at least – only website or mobile app users can receive the highest quality broadcasts for listening through their cheap ear buds, whereas people with high-end hi-fi equipment are supposed to be satisfied with 128kb/s DAB broadcasts. As with the BBC’s streams, it is possible to reverse engineer the Classic FM app and find a way to access the streams, although it isn’t straightforward to listen that way as it involves generating a URL that’s only valid for a short period. Given that it required reverse engineering, I am not going to publish details here, but anyone who is interested is welcome to contact me for more information.

As an aside, I should mention that I sometimes found when restarting the app that it streamed in HD mode from startup even though it said “HD off”. It required a toggle on and off to stream at a lower bitrate, a bug that could quickly eat up mobile users’ data allowances.

Is it actually worth the trouble of using the HD stream outside of the app? A look at the frequency spectrum of a typical broadcast (the end of Alfred Hill’s piano concerto – I hadn’t heard of him either!) immediately shows one disappointment. The frequency cut-off is still 15kHz. With 192kb/s AAC to play with, I would have thought that could be extended to 18kHz at least. This is probably more to do with the processing chain at Classic FM than a deliberate attempt to restrict the quality, but it’s as if they want to retain some features of FM broadcasts even when most people are no longer listening to analogue radio!

Spectrum of a Classic FM HD broadcast

There are some subtle differences in the spectrum compared to the 128kb/s MP3 stream, but nothing compared to the difference between those and the low-bitrate AAC stream, which has plenty of holes and a much rougher appearance. That is only to be expected. To the ear, I do think the HD stream has the edge, with a slightly richer bass and more detail at high frequencies, although annoyingly it shows up the dynamic range compression of the advertisements far more. I hope they will further improve the stream in the future by adjusting the 15kHz low-pass filter. In the meantime, I’d reassure Classic FM listeners around the world that the MP3 stream is still one of the best ways to listen. Internet streaming is the clear winner when it comes to sound quality.

]]>http://jonathan.rawle.org/2016/11/06/classic-fm-hd-stream/feed/3Renaming honourshttp://jonathan.rawle.org/2016/10/09/renaming-honours/
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2016/10/09/renaming-honours/#commentsSun, 09 Oct 2016 17:16:38 +0000http://jonathan.rawle.org/?p=463Former footballer Howard Gayle made headlines for a second time this week for declining an MBE, this time suggesting that the name of the honour should be changed to remove the reference to the British Empire.

It is important to remember that the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” is an order of chivalry, so named because it was instituted during the time of the British Empire by King George V. The name is not supposed to imply that it is an honour awarded by the British Empire, any more than the Order of the Bath implies that its members are the ones who assist the Queen in bathing.

Having said that, it’s hard not to have sympathy with Mr Gayle’s view, and he is not the only one to object to an honour on the grounds of its name. Back in 2004, a committee of MPs looked into the honours system, and recommended changing the name to the “Order of British Exellence”. They reasoned that it needed to retain the same abbreviations, MBE, OBE, etc. as everyone was familiar with these, and that otherwise existing recipients would feel their honour was outdated and worth less than newer ones. One commentator at the time remarked that it sounded more like an award from a trade organisation. Quite apart from the suggested name sounding ridiculous, orders of chivalry can not just have their names changed like that. They could institute a new order, and if desired stop appointing people to the old one, but our history should not be messed around with, and I would have expected members of parliament to be better informed.

Other Commonwealth countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, have stopped appointing to the Order of the British Empire and instituted new, alternative orders. Existing recipients retained their old honours and postnominals such as OBE, and it seems there was no confusion or feeling that older awards were devalued. Rather than mess about with historic orders, why not create a new one? As we now have the longest-serving monarch in history, what better name than the Royal Elizabethan Order, taking the Royal Victorian Order as its precedent? It could have the same ranks as the Order of the British Empire, and postnominals ending either “EO” or “RE”. The former would match the Victorian Order, but MRE, ORE, etc. would look more similar to MBE, OBE, which would perhaps go some way towards placating people such as the MPs on that committee.

The Queen has said that she doesn’t want to see any changes to her grandfather’s Order during her reign. What better way to commemorate the Queen’s reign, whenever in the future it finally comes to an end, than by instituting a new order of chivalry in her name?